


Malta

by darkandstormyslash



Category: Cucumber | Banana | Tofu (TV)
Genre: M/M, Mentions of Sex, discussion of past sexual actions, fairly gentle and fluffy, the odd swearword
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-04
Updated: 2017-04-04
Packaged: 2018-10-14 21:41:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,413
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10544792
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/darkandstormyslash/pseuds/darkandstormyslash
Summary: Henry Best finally takes that holiday on the beach. Freddie comes with him. Nobody has an epiphany, but somehow it all turns out alright.





	

Freddie wanders in the day before Henry's flight, flicking open the door like he owns the house and looking around with bored disinterest at the bags and suitcases blocking the hallway.

“Off somewhere?”

“Malta.” Henry snaps, because he’s left everything far too late and is now trying to pack and tidy and sort his work out all at once. “Probably. I might cancel.”

Freddie looks at him. He’s wearing sunglasses but Henry can see his expression loud and clear on the rest of his face. Freddie knows he won’t make it, knows he’s going to cancel, and that’s why Freddie is here.

“Which flight are you taking?”

“Tomorrow morning. I don’t know. Easyjet or cheapAir or something.” Henry watches with distrust as Freddie pulls out his phone. “Tickets are on top of the coffee table in a green folder. Why are you here?”

Freddie walks through to the next room, unconcerned, picking at the tickets and glancing at them, then tapping away on his phone. “Where are you staying?”

“Oh for –“ Henry puts down a pile of laundry and glares at him, or at least tries to glare. He can’t compete with the chiseled haughty perfection that is Freddie. He never has been able to. “Are you coming too, is that it? You want a holiday? You might as well take my tickets, because I’m not going. The whole idea is completely ridiculous, I mean…”

Freddie slides the tickets back into the folder and pulls out the carefully printed hotel reservation, “Well fuck that, I can’t afford that. I’ll stay nearby and use your pass to get into the spa.”

“What if I want to get into the spa?” Henry grumbles because there’s clearly no way to stop Freddie coming. He’s also not sure he wants to stop Freddie coming. “This trip isn’t about you, it’s one of the very many things in my life that aren’t about you. It’s about me, sitting on a beach, coming to terms with, well, with myself. Having an epiphany. Understanding myself, sorting myself out.” _Forgiving myself_ , he thinks, but doesn’t say it.

“Great. Well, while you’re doing that I’ll be at the spa.” Freddie raises his eyebrows behind his glasses, flops down onto the sofa and picks up the remote control.

* * *

Without Freddie, Henry knows he would never have made it. Never have dared go to the airport or actually check onto the flight. He wonders if he’s always needed someone like Freddie in his life; or maybe his life has never before been at the point where he’s been able to let someone like Freddie in.

Freddie sips Bloody Marys throughout the flight and disappears down the back aisle with a steward. Henry watches them go and feels something like a lump in his chest. He’d always felt jealous of Freddie, jealous of his confidence, the ease with which he used and practiced his own sexuality.

It had taken six long years to realise that Freddie was as scared of himself as Henry was.

* * *

Henry’s hotel is bright, airy, white, and clean. Within ten minutes of unpacking Freddie has tracked sand in through the polished wood floor and dumped a dirty towel onto his bed. “Nice place. Mine’s really grotty. Properly disgusting.”

“Nobody forced you to come.” Henry points out.

Freddie shrugs. “I’ve stayed in worse.” He glances at Henry to check he’s heard and then his lips quirk upwards into something that’s not even a smirk but more of a smile. “Well I have.”

“I’m sure you have.”

Freddie steps forward, brushing past him to pick up the room key. “Go on then. Go and sit on a sun lounger and gaze at the setting sun. Get all your hippy out. I’ll be in the gym.”

“Be …” Henry says and stops. What was he going to say? Be careful? Be decent? Don’t flirt with every gym-bunny in the hotel and end up fucking half of them to irritate the other half? “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.” He finally finishes with, just to watch Freddie roll his eyes.

“That rules out everything except breathing doesn’t it?”

There’s a brief kiss on his cheek, surprisingly shy and hesitant, and then Freddie is gone.

* * *

On the second day Freddie leaves. Henry isn’t sure why. A minibus rocks up outside the hotel and Freddie gets onto it in a pair of white shorts and a ridiculously colourful over-large T-shirt. He comes back without the T-shirt and with a pair of new sunglasses, sporting some interesting tanlines.

He spends a day by the pool, destroying Henry’s attempts at self-forgiveness by rolling over every ten minutes in a pair of speedos, and drinks up Henry’s tab at the bar.

* * *

On the fourth day, Freddie leaves again, but this time he returns at midday with a pair of car keys and throws them at Henry. “Get up. I’ve hired a car. We’re going for a drive.”

“What? Where!”

“Anywhere. Up into the hills. Anywhere but here.”

Henry grabs a few towels and shrugs his shirt on. He’s picked up a hat, white and broad brimmed, that he’s pretty proud of. He’s never quite found a hat style that he feels suits him.

Freddie gives the hat a disgusted look. “Do you have to wear that?”

“My head burns.”

“You look like an aging Columbian drug lord.”

“I am wearing the hat.”

Freddie seems to have driven up here before, as he’s happy enough to direct as Henry drives. Despite his initial grumbling, Henry does actually begin to enjoy himself. It’s certainly relaxing being by the sea, but it feels a bit stifling, a bit oppressive. He’s paying an awful lot for this holiday, even discounting the amount Freddie is drinking, and he feels the pressure to have at least a reasonable shift in his life and attitude for the amount he’s paying.

Here though the air is a bit cooler with a sea breeze through the windows. The car isn’t in fantastic shape, but it bounces along the track easily enough. It feels like he’s driving away from his problems. Henry can suddenly see the appeal of Freddie’s solution; to be forever running, never stopping for fear of what might find you.

Freddie rests back in his seat, arm stuck out the window with a cigarette dangling in it, his new sunglasses perched on his head. He looks beautiful, as beautiful as ever; tattooed and tanned. But Henry doesn’t feel it any more, that dizzying helpless desire. The desire to worship, to ever be unworthy, to chase the impossible because the best thing about the impossible was that it could never, ever, come true.

“Eyes on the road Henry.” Freddie says, and Henry gives a laugh. Freddie laughs too, or at least his mouth twists up and he exhales a little harder. “But you were looking.”

“I’ll always look.”

Freddie glances at him, then tips his head back and closes his eyes. “Never more than looking?”

“Never.” There was a moment, Henry knows, when he realised he could never, ever, have sex with Freddie Baxter. The moment after Lance’s funeral, when Freddie had crept into his bed and lay there, in a pair of tight white underwear and a slender pale naked body. The one moment when he could’ve taken it. The one moment he realised he never would.

Freddie shakes his head, and takes another drag of the cigarette, “You’re bad for my ego.”

“Do you have any other friends,” Henry asks curiously, “That you haven’t fucked?”

“Christ Henry, we aren’t _friends_.”

“Well do you?”

“You sound like my mother.” Freddie makes an irritated little sound, “Of course I don’t. Don’t go thinking that makes you special.”

“Not special. More … hopeless.”

This time Freddie laughs properly, “Absolutely hopeless, Henry, absolutely hopeless.”

They stop for lunch at the top of a hill, overlooking the countryside with the sea winking in the distance. Freddie has bought beer and salami, and seems irritated that this doesn’t appear to constitute a proper meal. Henry lays out the towels and lies down, flipping his hat over his face and listening to droning flies in the warm air. He feels absurdly happy.

“I’ve never been back before.” Freddie’s voice punctures through the air, spoiling the silence. Henry gives a little grunt, not quite ready to return to reality.

“I came back to Manchester.” Freddie continues, either oblivious or uncaring that Henry isn’t really participating. “I’ve never come back to anywhere before. Usually I just leave.”

“Were you missing a notch?” Henry replies. He doesn’t mean to sound bitter, but somehow the words twist a little as they come out. He feels Freddie place a cool hand on his chest and jumps a little, knocking his hat up to look, “Oh come on, what are you –“

Freddie’s lips meet his, soft and gentle, and for a moment Henry lets him, lost in the dizzying moment before he comes to his senses. He raises a hand to push Freddie back, firmly but not unkindly, but before he can Freddie moves of his own accord, sitting back in the grass.

They stare at each other, and Freddie looks lost and bewildered and somehow very young. Henry can feel his heart pounding in his chest before he whispers gently. “It’s not, Freddie, it’s not the only thing you have. Not the only thing you’re worth. Really.”

Freddie wields his sex like a weapon. He uses it to hurt, to wound, to take and to conquer. Against Henry he has no resistance, no way in, his most powerful defense and most powerful attack taken away and rendered useless.

“I used to be so _scared_.” Henry continues, his throat feels tight and he wonders if this is maybe how an epiphany feels. “So scared, all the time. All those years. Afraid of men, afraid of sex, afraid of everything I was and what it meant. You all looked so _confident_. So certain, and-“

Freddie flops back down again and the moment tears along the seams. Henry feels foolish suddenly, old and foolish. As if his problems, born of a world of forbidden homosexuality, AIDS, fears and silence can compete with the Brave New World of problems that Freddie has grown up with. A world of Grindr and condoms and easy sex and hot men.

“That’s because you’re basically useless, Henry.” Freddie says, but he says it gently and Henry lies down again on the grass and covers his face with his hat.

“Shut up, I was about to have an epiphany.”

“Well get on with it then. I want to head down to the village in half an hour and pick up some cheap booze for tonight. We’re having a BBQ down at Louis’s.”

Freddie sounds smug, and Henry suddenly realises that Freddie has brought him up here on purpose. Freddie knows why he’s on holiday and, in his own complicated little way, is trying to help. The last time Freddie tried to help, if Henry remembers rightly, he was set up with a distinctly non-Scottish man who spoke a lot of French.

“Who’s Louis?” he asks drowsily.

“Nobody. Shut up and get your epiphany.”

* * *

After the first week, Freddie vanishes, and Henry comes back to find a note on his bed scrawled on the hotel stationary <Gone to Italy. Don’t wait up.>

Freddie’s absence hurts, but the sting is far less than last time. He’s never going to have Freddie in his life, and Henry sighs and carefully dismantles some carefully constructed little fantasies of him and Freddie walking along the beach, drinking cocktails together, curled up in a double bed in the heat of the night. He wants to be with Freddie, he realises with a dull empty ache, but he doesn’t want to sleep with Freddie, and the idea of tying Freddy Baxter, of all people, into a relationship like that is laughable.

He walks along the beach by himself instead. He sips cocktails alone, and then with a group of elderly ladies on a package holiday, and finally with a man called Stephan who recently retired and split up with his wife. Stephan is big and friendly and used to work as a manager in Tesco. Henry rather gets on with him. They stay up late, and then stay up later, and part regretfully when Stephan’s holiday comes to an end.

On the third week he gets a postcard with a picture of Venice on the front of it sent from Rome. Freddie has filled the back of the postcard with carelessly dropped names and places and hinted actions and it makes Henry smile. He hopes it wasn’t his actions that set Freddie off running. One kiss on a hillside hardly seems enough to spook him, but he can never really tell with Freddie.

Once again, he realises hopelessly, he is starting to form Freddie-fantasies in his head. Freddie travelling the world sending Henry postcards as he goes, a scattered trail of a life he can live through vicariously. Fantasies of a boy always running, yet who has one little place in Manchester he can keep coming back to, one place where he always feels safe.

Impulsively, Henry writes a letter to Stephan. He never hears back.

* * *

After a month, Henry heads back home, feeling relaxed and calm and slightly sunburnt. He hasn’t had an epiphany, no great understanding of the world has landed in his mind, but he thinks maybe life isn’t about epiphanies. Maybe it’s about getting through each day as well you can, and trying not to feel scared.

He hopes that counts as an enlightenment of sorts. It was a very expensive holiday to not get at least some enlightenment.

He returns to a pile of mail blocking up his door and a host of apologetic texts from Cleo about not being able to do a tidy before he returned. He sorts the letters at the dining-room table, his suitcase still unpacked. He sorts them slowly, carefully, and deliberately, like he has all the time in the world to get to the bottom of the pile.

As if he’s not watching out for a certain handwriting.

Even when his eye catches sight of it, he refuses to look. He shuffles it to the bottom of the pile and keeps going. Bills, circulars, reminders, flyers. Until there’s only one unopened letter left on the table.

Henry picks it up, gently and reverentially, the letter in Freddie Baxter’s handwriting. And he can’t stop himself smiling.


End file.
